James vs Russell on Pragmatism
Russell's acid review of pragmatist truth
Venue: Russell, "Transatlantic Truth" (*Albany Review*, 1908), reprinted in *Philosophical Essays* (1910); James, *Pragmatism* (1907); *The Meaning of Truth* (1909).
Russell's elegant evisceration of James's pragmatist theory of truth — and James's patient and partially-successful defence.
William James's *Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking* (1907) defended the doctrine that truth is what works — the property of beliefs that successfully guide action and integrate with the rest of our belief-system. The book became famous and contested. Bertrand Russell, then building his analytical-realist programme, published "Transatlantic Truth" in 1908: a sharp critique arguing that James's account either reduces truth to mere usefulness (which is straightforwardly false: usefulness can attach to falsehoods) or borrows surreptitiously from a correspondence account it claims to displace. James's 1909 *The Meaning of Truth* collected his replies to Russell and others. The exchange clarified what is and is not at stake in pragmatist theories of truth and shaped the early-20th-century analytic reception of American pragmatism.
Historical Context
James was 65 in 1907, the most famous philosopher in America; Russell was 35, on the verge of his collaboration with Whitehead on *Principia Mathematica*. Russell's critique was conducted with charm and respect; James's replies were genial. Both took the disagreement seriously without enmity.
Parties
Truth is the property of beliefs that work — that successfully guide action, integrate with experience, and survive in the marketplace of inquiry. "Truth happens to an idea" through its fruitful consequences.
Key arguments
- "True" applies to ideas whose function in our experience proves valuable: prediction, control, coordination, integration of past with present.
- Correspondence to "an independent reality" is either trivially true (so what?) or unintelligible (how could we check, except pragmatically?).
- The pragmatic method is a way of settling philosophical disputes — by asking what difference each side's being true would make in practice.
- Russell's objections caricature pragmatism by reducing "works" to "is convenient"; James's account is richer.
Allied schools
James conflates truth with usefulness. Useful beliefs can be false; true beliefs can be useless. Pragmatism's account of truth either fails to capture truth or surreptitiously reintroduces correspondence to do the work it claims to dispense with.
Key arguments
- Counterexamples: a belief in Santa Claus might be useful to a child without being true; the truth that I have an arm is independent of any usefulness.
- James's account, fairly read, requires that "works" mean "tracks the truth," which is the very notion pragmatism claimed to replace.
- The pragmatist criterion does not distinguish truth from convenient falsehood (e.g., a benign delusion).
- Pragmatism's undoubted insights (about inquiry, about the holistic structure of belief) survive without the controversial doctrine of truth.
Allied schools
Dimensions Engaged
Observer
Observer · Knowledge Extent: what is the proper analysis of the notion of true belief?
Information
Information · Ontological Status: is truth a substantive property of information-contents or a functional-pragmatic property of effective beliefs?
Verdict in retrospect
Russell's objections persuaded most analytic philosophers of the period; pragmatism receded as a major analytic position until its mid-century revival (Quine, Sellars, Davidson). James's actual position is generally read as more sophisticated than Russell's critique suggested; his careful reformulations in *The Meaning of Truth* answered some objections without persuading Russell. The exchange remains the classic statement of the analytic-pragmatist disagreement on truth.
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Further reading
- James, *Pragmatism* (1907); *The Meaning of Truth* (1909)
- Russell, "Transatlantic Truth" in *Philosophical Essays* (1910)
- Misak, *The American Pragmatists* (2013)